To-Do List: Tomatoes for Clinton; Syrian Civil War

To know: Egyptian protesters threw tomatoes and shoes at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s motorcade … North Korean military chief Ri Yong Ho was relieved from service due to an “illness” … Fighting continues in the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Homs; the Red Cross says the country is in a state of civil war … Microsoft and NBC ended their sixteen-year Web site joint venture … “Oklahoma!” actress Celeste Holm died yesterday; she was ninety-five.

To read: In the Washington Post, Scott Wilson assesses President Obama’s failures in the Middle East:

It was their first meeting with the new president, and the dozen or so Jewish leaders picked to attend had made an agreement among themselves: No arguing—either with each other or their host.

The pledge would be hard to keep.

Five weeks earlier, President Obama had traveled to Cairo to ask for a “new beginning” between his government and an Islamic world angry about the United States’ wars in two Muslim nations and its perceived favoritism toward Israel. Now, he was calling in these influential Jewish leaders to explain his thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Not long ago, a group of prominent British journalists, all female, went out for an evening to get drunk on gin. Very drunk on gin. One of them walked headlong into a door. Another confessed to having been caught in flagrante delicto at a funeral. Eventually, they settled into one of their favorite pastimes:bemoaning—increasingly loudly—the sorry state of contemporary feminism. How had a movement that had once been so incendiary, so vibrant, and so effective become so tedious? How had it been hijacked not only by stodgyacademics but by Sex and the Citydivas: women who, as Caitlin Moran, a columnist at the London Times (and, as it happens, the woman who banged into the door), said, would have us believe that “if we have fabulous underwear we’ll be somehow above the terrifying statistic that only one percent of the world’s wealth is owned by women.”

Was it any wonder recent polls had found that 52 percent of British women and 71 percent of American women didn’t identify as feminists? The assembled ladies banged their fists on the table. They tossed back more gin. Finally, someone—it’s unclear who—said that one of them needed to write a book: something raucous and real about why feminism still mattered. A taking-stock of womanhood in an age of unprecedented freedoms and nagging contradictions.